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The Ganzhi as Phonograms and their Application to the Calendar*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Edwin G. Pulleyblank*
Affiliation:
2708 W. 3rd Avenue, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, V6K 1M5

Abstract

Three related but independent propositions are put forward and investigated: (1) a revised version of a theory of the Old Chinese rhymes based on the assumption that there were only two rhyme vowels, ∕ə∕ and ∕a∕, and eighteen final consonants, namely, labials -p, -m, dentals -t, -n, -l, -s, velars -k, -ŋ, -ɤ, palatals, -kj, -ŋj, -j, labiovelars -kw, -ŋw, -w, and palatolabiovelars -kɥ, -ŋɥ, -ɥ (as found in the modern Fuzhou dialect); (2) a revised version of a theory that the ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches originated as phonograms naming acrophonically the initial consonants of the Chinese language at the time of their invention, the consonants being the same as those reconstructed finally, with the addition of the fricatives x-, xj-, xw-, xɥ-;(3) a hypothesis to explain the calendrical use of these signs on the assumption that the Stems were chosen, as far as possible, from signs with the same initial consonants as the numerals from one to ten, while the remaining twelve signs were treated as a supplementary series of twelve.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1991

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Footnotes

*

This is an enlarged version of a paper entitled “The calendar and the origins of Chinese writing,” presented at the 6th International Conference on the History of Science in China, Cambridge, England, 2–7 August, 1990, and at the 33rd International Congress of Asian and North African Studies, Toronto, Canada, 19–24 August, 1990. I should like to acknowledge useful comments from William Boltz, David Keightley and Ken'ichi Takashima, as well as two anonymous reviewers for Early China, none of whom is responsible for any errors in the final version.

References

1. This idea was first made public in a paper entitled “The Chinese cyclical signs and the origins of the alphabet,” presented to the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society on 23 March 1975, and circulated in typescript. A much revised version of this paper was later published as The Chinese cyclical signs as phonograms,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 99: 2438CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For reasons that are set out in the article, I had by this time abandoned the idea of a connection with the alphabet. Other more recent discussions of the hypothesis are “The twenty-two phonograms: A key to the Old Chinese sound system,” at the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society, University of Washington, Seattle, 25–28 March 1984, and “The twenty-two phonograms as a key to Old Chinese phonology,” Western Branch, AOS, University of California, Berkeley, 13–14 November 1987.

2. Karlgren, Bernhard, Études sur la phonologie chinoise (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 19151926)Google Scholar, translated into Chinese by Changpei, Luo 羅常培, Yuen-ren, Chao 趙元任 and Fang-kuei, Li 李方桂 as Zhongguo yinyunxue yanjiu 中國音韻學硏究 (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937)Google Scholar.

3. Pulleyblank, Edwin G., Middle Chinese: a study in historical phonology (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984)Google Scholar. See also Pulleyblank, Edwin G., A Lexicon of reconstructed pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1991)Google Scholar, which contains some minor modifications in detail.

4. Karlgren, Bernhard, Grammata Serica, reprinted from Bulletin of Far Eastern Antiquities 12 (1940), 1471Google Scholar, and Grammata Serica Recensa, reprinted from Bulletin of Far Eastern Antiquities 29 (1957), 1332Google Scholar. See also Karlgren, Bernhard, Compendium of phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese, reprinted from the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 22 (1954), 211367Google Scholar.

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8. This was first suggested by Haudricourt, André G., “Comment reconstruire le chinois archaïque,” Word 10 (1954), 364CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Downer, Gordon B., “Derivation by tone change in Classical Chinese,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 22 (1959), 258290CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forrest, R.A.D., “Les occlusives finales en chinois archaïque,” Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris 55 (1960), 228239Google Scholar; Pulleyblank, E.G., “The consonantal system of Old Chinese,” Asia Major n.s. 9 (1962), 217 ff.Google Scholar; Pulleyblank, E.G., “Some further evidence regarding Old Chinese -s and its time of disappearance,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 36 (1973), 368–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11. I now interpret this as infixation of *a, since -ǝ־ is not an underlying phoneme but inserted epenthetically by rules of syllabification. See Pulleyblank, E.G., “An interpretation of the vowel systems of Old Chinese and Written Burmese,” Asia Major n.s. 10 (1963), 200221Google Scholar; Close/open ablaut in Sino-Tibetan,” Lingua 14 (1965), 230240CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The locative particles 于, 於, and hu,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 106 (1986), 911Google Scholar; “Ablaut and initial voicing,”

12. Pulleyblank, E.G., “Some notes on morphology and syntax in Classical Chinese,” in Chinese texts and philosophical contexts, ed. Rosemont, Henry Jr. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991), 2145Google Scholar.

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14. This was first proposed in Pulleyblank, “An interpretation of the vowel systems.” See also The final consonants of Old Chinese,” Monumenta Serica 33 (19771978), 180206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. The first model for my two-vowel analysis was the analyses of Northwest Caucasian languages in Allen, W.S., “Structure and system in the Abaza verbal complex,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1956), 127–76Google Scholar, and Kuipers, A.H., Phoneme and morpheme in Kabardian (s'Gravenhage: Mouton, 1960)Google Scholar. Kuipers' analysis of Kabar-dian as having no phonemic vowels was criticized by Halle, Morris, “Is Kabardian a vowel-less language?Foundations of Language 6 (1970), 95103Google Scholar, but it is important to note that Halle did not reject the reduction of the vowel system to a single ‘vertical’ opposition between ∕ǝ∕ and ∕a∕. For a more favorable verdict on Kuipers' “vowel-less” analysis in terms of more recent developments in generative phonology, see Anderson, Stephen R., “Syllables, segments and the Northwest Caucasian languages,” in Syllables and segments, ed. Bell, A. and Hooper, J.B. (Amsterdam and New York: North Holland Publishing Company, 1978), 4758Google Scholar.

16. Dixon, R.M.W., The languages of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 131Google Scholar. Foley, William A., The Papuan languages of New Guinea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 52Google Scholar.

17. The history of this kind of analysis of Mandarin goes back to Chao, Yuen Ren, “The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems,” Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 4 (1934), 363397Google Scholar. It was developed formally in Hartman, Lawton M. III, “The segmental phonemes of the Peiping dialect,” Language 20 (1944), 2842CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hockett, Charles F., “Peiping phonology,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 67 (1947), 253–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with later contributions in the American structuralist tradition by Hockett, Martin and others. See also Hockett, Charles F., A Manual of Phonology (Baltimore: Waverley Press, 1955), 88Google Scholar. For a summing up, see Chao, Y.R., A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 2324Google Scholar. The implications of the analysis are obscured in the notation used by Hockett and Chao by the fact that they write the medial semivowels with vowel symbols but Hockett is quite explicit in distinguishing “a class of two vowels [his emphasis], ∕ǝ a∕, which are always contoids and vocoids” and “a class of semivowels [his emphasis], ∕i u r ü∕, which occur as peaks in syllables containing no vowels, but as parts of onsets or of complex peaks when flanked by a vowel” (A Manual of Phonology, 62). For discussions of the interpretation of rhyming in Chinese, see Pulleyblank, , “Ablaut and initial voicing,” and “Middle Chinese: a response to some criticisms,” Monumenta Serica 38 (19881989), 238240Google Scholar.

18. See Pulleyblank, Edwin G., “The final consonants of Old Chinese,” Monumenta Serica 33 (19771978), 180206CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for detailed arguments.

19. Pulleyblank, “The final consonants of Old Chinese.”

20. Trubetzkoy, N.S., “Aus meiner phonologischer Kartothek. I. Das phonologische System der dunganischen Sprache,” Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 8 (1939), 2226Google Scholar.

21. Henderson, Eugénie J.A., “Towards a prosodic statement of Vietnamese syllable structure,” in In memory of J.R. Firth, ed. Bazell, C.E., et al. (London: Longmans, 1966), 163197Google Scholar.

22. As a full word er 而 means ‘whiskers of an animal’ and the graph is presumably a drawing. It must be cognate to xu 須 EMC suă ‘whiskers,’ a homophone of xu 需. Cf. also sai 思EMC sǝj < *sǝɤ ‘bearded,’ probably going back to something like **snǝq. I presume that the root in these words for ‘whiskers’ was *sn-ɥ, vocalized either by the insertion of -ǝ- or -a-. It is uncertain how we should account for Middle Chinese n-/ɲ- instead of s- in some forms, possibly by a prefix *ă-: ăsn- > zn- > n-.

23. It will be argued below that in the third Branch yin *initial *ŋj denasalized to j- in EMC. There is reason to think, however, that the nasal initial was retained under certain conditions, probably having to do with labialization at some point in the syllable. The graph ru 入, which could be interpreted as an arrowhead, may be related to 寅 which, in its ancient form, appears to be an elaboration of an “arrow.”

24. Karlgren, , Études, 885Google Scholar.

25. Pulleyblank, , “Consonantal system,” 216 ff.Google Scholar; Pulleyblank, “Some further evidence,” and Pulleyblank, E.G., “Some examples of colloquial pronunciation from the Southern Liang Dynasty,” in Studia Sino-Mongolica: Festschrift für Herbert Franke, ed. Bauer, Wolfgang (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag: Wiesbaden, 1979), 318319Google Scholar.

26. Pulleyblank, , “The final consonants of Old Chinese192193Google Scholar.

27. In Pulleyblank, ״Ablaut and initial voicing,” where the initials now reconstructed as labiovelars are identified as uvulars, the rule is stated in the converse way; that is, uvulars are said to acquire labialization before and after the non-low vowel ∕ə∕.

28. Benedict, Paul K., Sino-Tibetan: a conspectus, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 37 n. 122, 47, 191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Pulleyblank, “Some new hypotheses,” and “Ablaut and initial voicing.”

30. For the distinction between Type A and Type B syllables, corresponding roughly to the absence or presence of yod in Karlgren's system, see Pulleyblank, , Middle Chinese, 78 and 177 ffGoogle Scholar. In Old Chinese reconstructions, Type A syllables are marked by an acute accent over the vowel and Type B syllables are marked by a grave accent over the vowel.

31. Fang-kuei, Li, “Certain phonetic influences of the Tibetan prefixes upon the root initials,” Bulletin of the the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 4 (1933), 135157Google Scholar.

32. Benedict, , Sino-Tibetan, 17 ffGoogle Scholar.

33. Emmerick, R.E. and Pulleyblank, E.G., A Chinese text in Central Asian Brahmi script: New evidence for the pronunciation of Late Middle Chinese and Khotanese (Rome: Instituto Italiano per il Medio Ed Estremo Oriente, in press)Google Scholar

34. Fang-kuei, Li, “Some old Chinese loan words in the Tai languages,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 8 (1945), 333342CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Shih ming 釋名 (Sibu congkan ed.) 5.7a, said to be dialect of Qi and Lu, i.e. Shandong. See Bodman, N.C., A linguistic study of the Shih Ming: initials and consonant clusters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 71, gloss 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Pulleyblank, E.G., “Stages in the transcription of Indian words in Chinese from Han to T'ang,” in Sprachen des Buddhismus in Zentralasien: Vorträge des Hamburger Symposions von 2 Juli bis 5 Juli 1981, ed. Röhrborn, K. and Veenker, W. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983), 73110Google Scholar.

37. The character 竺 has three readings, EMC təwk, tawk and truwk, in the Guangyun, of which the last, homophonous with zhu 竹 “bamboo,” is specifically said to belong to 天竺 and is the source of the conventional later pronunciation, Tianzhu. Since 竺 in the reading EMC tawk is merely a variant writing for du 篤 “solid, sincere” however, and since a -tr- cluster (or retroflex stop) does not make sense in a transcription of Hinduka, it is likely that the conventional pronunciation, Tianzhu, is the result of later confusion. See Ciming, Li 李慈銘, Hou Hanshu zhaji 後漢書札記, cited in Lidaigezu zhuanji huibian 歷代各族傳記會編 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958), I, 649Google Scholar.

38. Pulleyblank, , “Stages in the transcription of Indian words in Chinese from Han to Tang,” 77Google Scholar.

39. Bodman, , A linguistic study of the Shih Ming, 2829Google Scholar.

40. For this kind of derivational process, see Pulleyblank, , “Some notes on morphology and syntax in Classical Chinese,” 29 ffGoogle Scholar.

41. Li, , “Some old Chinese loan words,” 336Google Scholar.

42. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, nos. 551, 591.

43. Pulleyblank, , “Consonantal system,” 114 ffGoogle Scholar.

44. Pulleyblank, E.G., “The transcription of Sanskrit k and kh in Chinese,” Asia Major n.s. 11 (1965), 204 ffGoogle Scholar. See also Pulleyblank, , “Some new hypotheses,” 116 ffGoogle Scholar.

45. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no. 856b.

46. See Pulleyblank, E.G., “Jo chih ho 若之何 → nai ho 奈何,” Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 59 (1988), 339–51Google Scholar.

47. Hashimoto, Mantaro J., The Hakka dialect: a linguistic study of its phonology, syntaxand lexicon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 359Google Scholar.

48. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no. 1114a.

49. Li, , “Some old Chinese loan words,” 338339Google Scholar.

50. Pulleyblank, , “Late Middle Chinese,” Asia Major n.s. 15 (1970) 197239, 16 (1971) 121-68, especially 229 ff.Google Scholar, and Pulleyblank, , Middle Chinese, 73 ffGoogle Scholar.

51. Hisao, HirayamaSetsuin ni okeru jōshoku in kaikō gakō on no onka,” Toyō gakuhō 東洋學報 55 (1972), 202230Google Scholar. See also Rong, Li 李榮, Qieyun shengxi 切韻聲系 (Beijing: Zhongguo kexueyuan, 1952), 55Google Scholar, and Pulleyblank, , Middle Chinese, 205206Google Scholar.

52. Grammata Serica Recensa, nos. 399 and 923.

53. Karlgren, Bernhard, Glosses on the Book of Odes (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1964), gloss 895Google Scholar.

54. Pulleyblank, E.G., “Studies in Early Chinese grammar, Part I,” Asia Major n.s. 8 (1960) 59 ffGoogle Scholar. Not all the examples of alternation between -t and -k cited in this old article are relevant to the present discussion.

55. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no. 936.

56. Li, , “Some old Chinese loan words,” 340Google Scholar. See also Li, F.K., A handbook of comparative Tai (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977), 142Google Scholar.

57. Li, , “Some old Chinese loan words,” 340Google Scholar.

58. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no. 1114.

59. Pulleyblank, , “Some examples of colloquial pronunciation,” 322323Google Scholar.

60. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no. 362g.

61. For the palatalization of 1- to ž in Tibetan, see Benedict, , Sino-Tibetan, 94Google Scholar.

62. Purnell, Herbert C. Jr., “Towards a Reconstruction of Proto-Miao-Yao” (Ph.D.diss: Cornell University, 1970), 72Google Scholar.

63. Xiaoding, Li 李孝定, Jiagu wenzi jishi 甲骨文字集釋 (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1974), 17611765Google Scholar.

64. Benedict, , Sino-Tibetan, 48Google Scholar.

65. Chavannes, Édouard, “Les pays d'occident d'après le Wei-lio,” T'oung Pao 6 (1905), 555Google Scholar; Pulleyblank, , “Consonantal system,” 116Google Scholar. See also Li, , “Shanggu yin yanjiu,” 10Google Scholar, who rather strangely assumes that the Chinese transcriber used Chinese *r for foreign l- and Chinese *l for foreign r-. On the contrary, this is a typical example showing the Han dynasty distinction between *r = Middle Chinese l- and *l = Middle Chinese j- or d-. The suggestion that retroflex g- in words like 山 EMC ʂain may have developed out of *ks-, rather than *sr-, is a conjecture that I hope to develop more fully elsewhere. 離 EMC liă should go back to Old Chinese *-al but this would have changed to *-aj before Western Han.

66. Zerubavel, , Eviatar, , The seven-day circle: the history and meaning of the week (New York, The Free Press, 1985), 8Google Scholar. Zerubavel misconstrues the ancient Chinese xun, that is, the ten-day gan cycle, as a ‘quasi week,’ that is, a division of the lunar month. This later usage of xun to mean a division of the month (which did not affect the continuity of the ganzhi cycle) must have arisen some time after the Zhou conquest when dating by the lunar month became much more prominent than it had been in Shang. The earliest explicit reference to xun as a division of the month that I have come across is in Guanzi 11, “Zhouhe 宙合,” which shows that it must have been in use during the Warring States period.

67. Zerubavel, , “The seven-day circle,” 45 ffGoogle Scholar.

68. Zerubavel, , “Theseven-day circle12 ffGoogle Scholar.

69. Zerubavel, , “The seven-day circle,” 50 ffGoogle Scholar.

70. Liji zhengyi 禮記正義, (Sibu beiyao ed.), 28.1a.

71. Erya zhushu 爾雅注疏, (Sibu beiyao ed.), 9.13b.

72. Moruo, Guo, “Shi zhi gan, in Jiagu wenzi yanjiu (1929; rpt. Beijing: Kexueyuan chubanshe, 1976), 165166Google Scholar.

73. Pulleyblank, , “Consonantal system,” 124Google Scholar.

74. See Pulleyblank, , Middle Chinese, 172 ffGoogle Scholar. for a discussion of the contrast between -i- and -ji- in EMC, corresponding to Grade III vs. Grade IV in LMC. The fact that -i- (Grade III) was associated with the representation of Sanskrit retroflexion in the transcription system of Jnanagupta suggests that there may have been a non-palatal oif-glide onto the vowel in such syllables. This could sometimes be a trace of an earlier medial -r- but there are also cases where this is unlikely; for instance, the Grade III part of the Qieyun zhi 支 EMC -iā rhyme, which must have come from earlier *-iaj < *-al (Old Chinese ge 歌 rhyme) as well as *-riaj < *-raj (Old Chinese zhi 支 rhyme). This suggests that, before disappearing, medial *-r- was replaced by a back-unrounded glide ʝ. For this and other reasons I now reconstruct the “Grade II” finals in EMC with the diphthongs and -əi- instead of the retroflex vowels -ε r- and -ar”; see Pulleyblank, , Lexicon, 11 ffGoogle Scholar. This treatment of medial *r suggests that one possible source may have been *r, which we reconstruct as the voiced continuant corresponding to the plain velar consonants *k, *x and *ŋ and which corresponds in distinctive features to the nonsyllabic form of the central or back unrounded vowel ɨ.

75. Pulleyblank, “Ablaut and initial voicing,” where, however, I reconstructed the initial as *q. The same arguments hold mutatis mutandis if the initial was *kw.

76. This reading is found in the Guangyun. The graph is now used for zha ‘sluice gate’ instead of the earlier graph .

77. Changpei, Luo 羅常培 and Zumo, Zhou 周祖謨, Han Wei Jin Nanbeichao yunbu yanbian yanjiu 漢魏晉南北朝韻部演變硏究 (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1958), 154Google Scholar. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no.353a, does not recognize this change in rhyming and reconstructs *χwâr.

78. If hui 薈 EMC ?wájh is an internal rhyme with wei 蔚 EMC ?ujh in Ode 151/4 (Karlgren, Book of Odes, following Yougao, Jiang 江有誥, Shijing yundu 詩經韻讀, in Jiang shi yinxue shi shu 江氏音學十書 [Taipei: Guangwen shuju, n.d.], 45b)Google Scholar, this is an example of a derivative of 會 rhyming in *-əts in the Odes.

79. Pulleyblank, , “Ablaut and initial voicing,” 1112Google Scholar.

80. Pulleyblank, , “Ablaut and initial voicing,” 810Google Scholar.

81. Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, no. 864m.

82. Li, , Shanggu yin yanjiu, 32Google Scholar.

83. Pulleyblank, , “Ablaut and initial voicing,” 1718Google Scholar.

84. To reconstruct *s as the original initial in Old Chinese does not agree with Tibeto-Burman, which shows forms that led Benedict to reconstruct a root *b-liy or *b-ləy, but it is difficult to relate the Middle Chinese form to such a root and there are also problems about the final, which ought to have ended in *-s or *-ts in Old Chinese.

85. Li, , A handbook of comparative Tai, 233Google Scholar.

86. Tsu-lin, Mei and Norman, Jerry, “Shi lun jige Minbei fangyan zhong de lai-mu s-sheng zi” 試論幾個閩北方言中的來母 s- 生字, Qinghua Xuebao n.s. 9 (1971), 96105Google Scholar.